Doug McIntyre: Love is love, in any form

Another election has come and gone, and I’m sure I cast votes I’ll live to regret. It happens every time. I end up voting for candidates who turn out to be big disappointments — or worse.

But while I often have buyer’s remorse after an election, I’ve only cast one vote in my life I’m actually ashamed of.

On March 7, 2000, 61 percent of California voters backed Proposition 22, the so-called “Knight Initiative,” which banned gay marriage in the Golden State. I was one of them.

Prop. 22 defined marriage as a union “only” between a man and a woman and prohibited recognition of gay or lesbian marriages performed outside the state.

While I forget most of the stuff I vote for as quickly as I forget where I park my car at the mall, I still remember feeling unclean after voting for Prop. 22. It just didn’t feel right to use my right to vote to deny someone else the right to marry.

Still, two guys? That wasn’t the world in which I was raised.

Ultimately, Prop. 22 was overturned by the California Supreme Court, prompting supporters of traditional marriage to push Proposition 8 in 2008, which passed with 52 percent of the vote.

I voted “no” on Prop 8.

It eventually met the same judicial fate as Prop. 22, and today gays and lesbians can marry in California. And guess what? The Republic still stands.

But the aha moment for me came at 4 p.m. on July 6, 2002, at The Little Brown Church in the Valley. That’s when I married the love of my life, Penny Peyser.

As I stood at the altar and looked out at friends and family on hand to share in our bliss, I couldn’t avoid the injustice that not everyone there that day had the right to marry the love of their life — starting with my freshly minted brother-in-law, Thomas Peyser.

Advertisement

Tom is a kind, brilliant, witty scholar and writer, a Ph.D. from Harvard and the chairman of the English Literature Department at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va.

He also happens to be gay. And because he’s gay, Tom Peyser does not have the right to marry in his home state, although the Commonwealth of Virginia allows convicted murderers to wed in prison, as long as they’re heterosexual murderers.

Of course, all of this was theoretical to me. For my brother-in-law, it’s personal. And while gay marriage is now legal in 19 states, it’s still banned in 31, including Virginia.

So, on Saturday I traveled to New York City with my wife to witness Tom exchange vows with the love of his life, Dr. Christopher Kogut, a psychiatry professor and the director of resi­dency education in psychiatry at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Chris is family. I can’t say it simpler than that.

Fourteen years after casting a vote that would have denied Tom and Chris the right to marry, I was honored to be a guest at this beautiful, joyful and historic cere­mony featuring traditional vows, pledges of fidelity, a request to God for his blessings — and an awkward first kiss as a married couple.

It’s never easy smooching in front of your parents.

I felt part of history — a tiny part — bearing witness to a same-sex union that was unthinkable just a few years ago.

While I have deep respect for everyone’s religious beliefs and everyone’s right to define marriage in accordance with the tenets of their faith, our civil society is built on the equal application of fundamental rights. You can’t get much more fundamental than the right to marry the person you love.

Shortly before Tom and Chris’s celebration drew to a close, my father-in-law — Tom’s dad, 92-year-old Peter Peyser, a veteran of World War II, a survivor of the Battle of the Bulge — added the perfect coda by singing a chorus of the Gershwins’ classic “Our Love Is Here to Stay.”

“It’s very clear . . .”

Doug McIntyre’s column appears Sunday and Wednesday. He can be reached at: doug@kabc.com.